Page File
El Reg bookworm Mark Diston looks at the latest from literature's non-fiction canon: US general Daniel Bolger endeavours to make sense of the senseless regarding America's operations in the Middle East and Glyn Johns, record producer for the stars, tells of his many, many, rock and roll years.
Why We Lost: A General's Inside …

Verizon is threatening legal action against Netflix after the streaming video service began streaming error messages that blame Verizon for slow network traffic.
The telecom giant has sent a cease-and-desist letter to Netflix, demanding that the company stop sending its users notification messages that point the finger at …

Shortly after being told I have Asperger's syndrome, I stood in front of 30-odd people, my work colleagues, telling them I have Asperger’s and what it means to them and to me. Some were like: "Meh, whatever!", some were busy looking their watches: "Is it lunchtime yet?" I could feel my job slowly ebbing away.
It was like …

Analysis
Almost all Britons know that their home energy bills have been climbing painfully in recent years, and many are realising that this process is now set to continue indefinitely. What's not clear is just why this is happening: some lay the blame on rising gas prices, others on profiteering energy firms.
Meanwhile, apropos of …

IBM and Accenture are sniping at one another in public over just who should take the blame - and the fall - for the $AUD1bn blowout of a project to provide the Australian State of Queensland's Department of Health with a new payroll system.
The project kicked off in 2007 with a budget of just over $6m. It's now expected to …

Microsoft will put a smaller, 7-inch Windows 8-powered Surface laptop-cum-tablet into production this year, according to insiders.
Shrinking the touchscreen slab wasn't part of Microsoft's strategy when the then-Windows chief Steven Sinofsky unveiled Redmond's own 12-inch Surfaces and similar-sized Windows 8 devices from PC …

According to a recently publicised set of emails, US financial watchdog the Securities and Exchange Commission found that important claims made by Facebook were unsupportable and forced the company to disclose key weaknesses in its business plan before its 18 May IPO.
The highlights are outlined in this lengthy report from …

Australian police have pointed the finger at Grand Theft Auto and other games of its kind for an alleged increase in the acceptance of violence in the country.
Barely a month has passed since Australia introduced an 18+ rating certificate for games which will allow titles such as the hotly-contested Mortal Kombat to be sold on …

Online gaming outfit Zynga has partly blamed competition being opened up on Facebook's platform for the maker of Farmville having to revise down its outlook for the year.
The company, which claims some 300 million monthly users, is also struggling to quickly release new games onto the market.
We are lowering our outlook to …

We at Freeform Dynamics have been running surveys and interactive workshops with The Register’s readership since 2006 on a wide variety of topics. Looking back, we see the same themes coming up time and time again.
One of these is the perpetual problem of IT staff feeling they are not able to respond quickly enough to change …

Virtualising systems often means scaling them up. Sometimes, disparate networks of machines are consolidated together, creating a mega-portfolio of assets. This carries a special set of technical challenges, but let’s not forget the managerial ones.
What happens when you scale a system by virtualising servers and cramming more …

If a hit West End play can be made out of Bohr meeting Heisenberg, there must be some promising dramatic material in the blame-game now unravelling in Whitehall.
Airports, energy providers, local authorities and health trusts were caught short by record cold weather extremes this year, for the third winter running – raising …

The DAB-only Traffic Radio service is to be shut down, leaving literally dozens of drivers stranded. The Highways Agency quango said the UK government will no longer fund the service once the contract expires in August 2011, RadioToday reports.
The service is broadcast over 30 multiplexes, and costs the taxpayer £1m to …

Project management
On completion of a project it's tempting to head straight for the nearest hostelry to sample some fine beverages; and then some. Maybe a good idea, but as any student of Prince2 will tell you, the job ain't finished until some form of closure report and benefits assessment has been done.
Such reports allow lessons to be learnt …

Workshop Poll
The word “governance” is one that tends to make most peoples’ eyes glaze over. But whether we are talking about running a corporation, managing an IT department or dealing with IT security, there has to be a mechanism in place for making sure that the right things are taken care of in an acceptable manner. And cutting through …

Workshop
Over the last year or so Freeform Dynamics has asked Reg readers if the new flexibility in deploying workloads in virtualised server infrastructures makes it possible to manage application delivery effectively while minimising the costs associated with delivering services.
We have also considered the challenges around …

AMD's former CEO Hector Ruiz has released a commentary that picks apart Intel's defense against the European Commission's €1.06bn fine for anticompetitve practices.
Ruiz's scathing rebuke, published by MarketWatch, excoriates Chipzilla's efforts to wriggle out of responsibility for the actions that led to the fine - especially …

Steve Ballmer has distanced himself from the ongoing “Vista Capable” legal spat by claiming he had no direct involvement in Microsoft’s marketing campaign for the operating system.
In a document (pdf courtesy of SeattlePI) filed last Friday, the software giant’s CEO effectively exonerated himself in the Windows Vista Capable …

The spat over who is to blame over the United Airlines share price crash continues.
It's common ground that a six-year-old United Airlines bankruptcy story became one of the most popular business stories on the Florida Sun Sentinel website early on Sunday morning, during a quiet news period, and was indexed by Google News. A …

Microsoft has so far failed to provide any plausible solution to Windows XP customers who have seen their PCs crippled by the install of service pack three (SP3).
In the meantime, forums throughout the internet are abuzz with possible workarounds and fixes, while rumours fly that suggest the sizeable blunder only affects some …

Evesham Technology chairman and founder Richard Austin appears to have performed an impressive U-turn over the reason behind the firm's current financial crisis, which has seen some 150 staff made redundant.
Austin has spent the last week blaming the government's withdrawal of the Home Computer Initiative (HCI) scheme for the …

Comment
After hearing about AMD's first quarter bloodbath, Carly Fiorina and Kevin Rollins must wonder what's wrong with Wall Street. No analyst has yet to place the call for Hector Ruiz's head.
AMD's Q1 blows away anything faced by HP ex Fiorina or Dell ex Rollins. The chipmaker lost $611m as processor sales collapsed by 38 per cent. …

Icstis chairman Sir Alistair Graham denied he was running a watchdog which had lost its bite at a press conference today.
He denied Icstis was reactive rather than proactive, pointing to the investigation into Call TV Quiz Services as an example. He said the regulator could impose fines of up to £250,000 as well as other …

The task of apportioning blame has begun in earnest in the wake of the Montreal college shootings as Canada and its media try to digest the incident.
Scrutiny has fallen on website vampirefreaks.com and gunman Kimveer Gill's favourite videogame Super Columbine Massacre.
Gill, 25, maintained a profile on vampirefreaks.com, a …

Microsoft continued to work on Tuesday to create a fix for an exploitable flaw introduced by the company's latest security update to Internet Explorer.
The flaw, initially thought to only crash Internet Explorer, actually allows an attacker to run code on computers running Windows 2000 and Windows XP Service Pack 1 that have …

Comment
Yesterday, the Australian recording industry went through its annual ritual of announcing a fall in music sales. Although, this time ARIA didn't blame digital music piracy for the fall - fans of the ARIA blame game will be pleased to see they industry included the obligatory reference to digital music piracy anyway - just for …

Letters
A varied haul this week, that's for sure. We've got thoughts on security, women and Microsoft certification, technology and education, and of course, the question of whether or not cats should be used to make fuel. It seems this last one is a real opinion divider.
Still, before we descend into the dungeons of daftness, let's …

Comment
In 2004, I came across an empirical study published by the CERT/CC that indicated a diminishing correlation between the number of vendor-issued vulnerabilities and the number of reported security incidents. In the years prior to 2002, the number of reported security breaches had always been proportional to the number of vendor- …

Comment
On July 21, 2005, the United States House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services, Subcommittee on Oversight held a hearing on Credit Card Data Processing: How Secure Is It?" Of course, just by asking the question,you already know what the answer is going to be: not a disaster, but about as secure as you might imagine …

BT has hit back at claims made by Cable & Wireless (C&W) that it is to blame for the problems facing broadband ISP Bulldog.
In a statement sent to The Register BT rejected accusations that it is responsible for problems experienced by Bulldog customers who have switched their phone and broadband services to the LLU ISP.
BT …

Bulldog - which has received a barrage of complaints about its unbundled broadband and telephone service - is considering lodging a formal complaint against BT over its alleged failure to migrate punters over to the Cable & Wireless (C&W) owned ISP.
At a shareholders meeting on Friday, C&W chairman Richard Lapthorne touched on …

The city of Orlando in Florida has pulled the plug on the city's free Wi-Fi service. Although the city has a population of over 1.8m, only around 27 people a day were using the service, which was costing the district $1,800 a month.
Metropolitan Wi-Fi has become the new cause for the internet lobby ever since the short-lived …

The US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is behind schedule in developing a new terrorist-busting database system called Secure Flight, a report by the Government Accounting Office (GAO) says.
After confronting the obvious defects in the old pre-9/11 CAPPS (computer-assisted passenger pre-screening system), which …

A dispute over ownership of "game.co.uk" could have significant and far-reaching effects on e-commerce in Britain.
The domain, which comes under the control of private company Nominet, was awarded to Game plc in January following a complaint that the owner, Garth Sumpter, was misusing it. Mr Sumpter, a consultant for the …

Mobile phone networks have been warned not to harm their future revenues with data tariffs designed to give the ailing WLAN hotpot business a death blow.
AT&T Wireless, which now boasts EDGE-speeds on most of its stateside GSM/GPRS network, recently launched an all-you-can eat data plan for $24.99. By comparison, WLAN provider …

The New York Times, in its easily-disposable Circuits section, returns to the wonderful world of Wi-Fi.
With last year's Wi-Fi bubble well and truly popped, reporting about the technology no longer has the gushing tone of a fundamentalist facing up to The Rapture. The wireless technology continues to spread, we're delighted to …

IDF
Nothing illustrates the gulf between logician Americans and metaphysical Europeans like their respective approaches to spectrum policy.
The idealistic US deregulation lobby rallies round concepts such as "freedom", as if they're absolutes, rather that social agreements. Networks must be open and free, and vested interests …

The public WLAN market is too volatile and won't make any money until 2008. Says who? Says PA Consulting's Dr. William Webb. He informs Electronics Weekly that WLAN hot spots "aren't making anyone money and will only come into their own as part of an integrated communications network in 2008".
Dr. Webb is to give a keynote next …

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer yesterday defended the company's record on security, arguing that, contrary to popular opinion, Windows was easier to secure than its open source rivals.
During a showpiece Interview with analysts during Gartner's ITXpo in Orlando, Ballmer went as far as suggesting data from security …

Eight years ago when I first used the Internet, while doing support work in a Manchester cyber café, email was a joy.
I could contact my friends, even when they were on the other side of the world, on the click of a mouse. It was so much easier and cheaper than the alternatives - snail mail or the phone.
Email is still …

Intel has admitted it has contributed to the vast volume of hot air being used to inflate the Wi-Fi bubble, thanks to its multi-million dollar Unwired advertising campaign.
Speaking at the annual Telecosm conference, held in Squaw Valley, California yesterday, Intel president Paul Otellini warned: "Wi-Fi is in danger of being …

A few spontaneous remarks by Sun Microsystems' pony-tailed software marketing whizz-kid Jonathan Schwartz have set analysts a-flutter.
Sun used the LinuxWorld show in town this week to showcase its Linux desktop, codenamed 'Mad Hatter', for the first time. There's nothing particularly interesting about Mad Hatter, which is …

A splendid and visceral story by Karen Lowry Miller in the current issue of Newsweek entitled 'The Wi-Fi Bubble' shines an unforgiving light on the public hot-spot mania - and the hypesters responsible for it.
The article doesn't make for uplifting reading, but it is a welcome counter to the juvenilia that accompanies the gushy …

Letters
When we first started to learn about SMP systems, our first thought was - gosh, don't they go on about caches a lot?
But it isn't just in parallel processing where the hairy business of cache coherency is a problem, as we've seen with the AMD Linux bug blame game. This has affected uniprocessor systems, and I was stumped. But …